Pentagon Ball

A quilting friend is moving away. Her husband is in poor health and the doctor has told them that he needs to live below 5000 ft. Alamosa is at about 7500 ft. She had a yard sale and called me to come look early because she had some things she thought Parker would like. Boy did she! I spent $60 on some science activity books, some magnet sets and activity books, a set of oil paints and a couple of quilt books.

One of the books had instructions for making a pentagon ball. Well ... it had a pentagon pattern and a few pictures with very basic instructions for making the ball. I found this website much more helpful with the construction of the ball. 

So I made 12 copies of the pentagon on freezer paper. I drew the pentagon shape also onto the fabric with a wash-away marker - I won't do this next time though. I roughly cut out the pentagons and embellished each. Then washed out the marker and put the freezer paper on the back. I used English paper piecing to construct the ball.

Here is half of the ball with just one seam sewn on each pentagon.

 

Here is the other half of the ball already sewn up.

And here is the finished ball.

I didn't embellish all 12 of the pentagons because I got worried that they wouldn't go together right and I didn't want to spend any more time on this before making sure I knew what I was doing. Everything went together fine thanks to the online tutorial I linked to above. The instructions in the book were total crap!

I'm thinking that these might be the ornaments I make for my nieces and nephews and Parker this year for Christmas. I would use Christmas fabric and better appliques for the real thing. However, Parker was really impressed with this one. I finished it after he went to bed one night last week. The next morning he saw it laying on my ironing table and said, "Wow! Did you make this mom?" Made me feel pretty good since it was an unsolicited comment.